Hello and thanks for joining us for this special edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

Los Angeles County sheriff.

Alex Villanueva is presiding over L.A. law enforcement during a critical point in the history of the City of Angels.

And there has been no lack of controversy, to say the least.

During his term in office, Sheriff Villanueva has dealt with everything from soaring crime rates and the defund the police campaign to immigration and controversial homeless policy.

And as Sheriff Villanueva continues to speak out on these issues and try and implement policy, he has some Angelenos praising him and some Angelenos harshly criticizing him.

Is the future of Los Angeles, according to Sheriff Villanueva sustainable?

Well, that's where we begin this special broadcast with an exclusive one on one interview via Zoom with the L.A. sheriff, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

Thank you so much for being here.

Oh, thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.

Sheriff, let me set the stage for this interview and bear with this question, because when we talk about sustainability here on this program, or at least how I view it, sustainability is so much more these days.

And just things like climate change, global warming, clean air, clean water.

We've reported on all that today.

Sustainability really does involve cities and county sheriff, things like homelessness, housing, crime, minimum wage, our future.

So let's begin with homelessness.

Explain to our audience your take on the homeless crisis in Los Angeles.

And really, I hate to even say the word a homeless crisis.

We should probably say epidemic, even pandemic.

With all due respect to COVID, because the homeless situation in L.A. is out of control, something we have never witnessed before.

Sheriff, tens of thousands of people lining the streets and all the collateral damage.

You have a controversial plan to try and help remedy this situation.

Tell our audience all about that.

The floor is now yours, sir.

Well, first, let's start with recognizing the homelessness crisis for what it is.

It's an existential threat to both the lives and the livelihoods of every single resident of Los Angeles County.

We have 25% of the entire nation's homeless are now residing in L.A. County.

We have half of the state's homeless population.

We have in excess of 80,000 homeless right here in L.A. County in everything that are the current mayor, Board of supervisors, city council has done is only exacerbated the problem, invited more people to be drawn to L.A. County to receive benefits and at the same time degrading our capacity to treat the people the right here, homegrown, who have mental health issues, drug abuse issues that need to be treated compassionately but forcefully so they get the help and they don't die on the streets every day like they're doing right now.

So we have to recognize we're at a point where we can change our behavior in modifier approach and recognize that threat, or we can just throw up our hands in the air like the current batch of elected people and just pretend everything's okay.

So detail for us a little bit more about that.

Obviously, you took a lot of flak when there was the issue of getting the homeless off of Venice Beach.

A lot of advocates were angry, really livid with you, claiming you don't really have a plan for housing.

There are a lot of mental illness components and drug addiction to it.

Can you really vet this and talk more comprehensively about your plan as you view it, Sheriff?

Well, sure.

Those advocates are paid advocates.

They yell at the top of their lungs, but at the end of the day, they're paid to keep the status quo exactly the way it is.

They're paid by the homeless industrial complex.

The city and the county spend six and a half billion dollars in ten years from 2011 to 2021 to see the problem grow by more than 100%.

At what point do you decide, Hey, this is not working?

Year to year three?

No, we're at year ten and oh my God, these people are still screaming at the top of their lungs.

They have no plan.

They're not going to take the homeless with themselves home to their own families.

No, what they're trying to do is say to bad communities, you're going to have to deal on your own because you can't touch them.

And I say that is a false narrative and we have a plan.

It will take the full cooperation of the city and county.

You know how impossible that is.

But in 90 days we can relocate the homeless to the shelter space.

It is available.

We have over 1300 properties between the city in the county that sit vacant right now is vacant.

You know, we don't even have to use eminent domain.

We could use those.

We can establish safe campgrounds, safe RV parking.

And for the people is still insists they want to bop their butts anywhere they want.

Those people, we can say, no, we're going to enforce the rule of law.

It's time to move on out of L.A. County.

This is not for you.

We can do this legally, safely and actually save lives in the process.

Sheriff, talk about some of the places you would relocate these homeless folks to.

What types of building facilities, what type of housing.

Obviously, as you know, any time you mention, again, the advocates, the activists, the critics say, well, what if these homeless people do not want to be sheltered?

What if they want to be on the street?

You're taking away their rights.

Can you talk about that?

I can tell you very easily, One, they do not have the right to park their tent anywhere they want an occupied public space.

No one has a right because it belongs to the public.

The primary function of government, in addition to safeguarding the lives of everyone, is to regulate public space.

Roughly 34% of all the homeless there is shelters space available somewhere in some capacity and is not being used 100%, not even close to 50%.

I'd be shocked.

So that's bed space is available in the safe campgrounds, safe RV park, RV parking are other options that are available, but they do not have the legal right to say, well, I just want to park my tent in front of a various street, kill the community, kill the businesses in Olvera Street.

So no tourists come because it's my God given right.

It is not according to the Boise decision, as long as there's a place where they can be housed, they have to move.

And that is the point.

But the city and the county have decided not to do anything.

And how is that working out for us?

And I know you don't make friends when you talk about the city and the county in that fashion.

Yet with that said, you don't mince words.

I believe that's why you have a lot of people who are praising you in addition to those I mentioned who are criticizing you.

I will concur with you and say this as a journalist, I've reported on more homeless stories than I can remember.

And I've interviewed every mayor in the last, let's say, 20 years here in Los Angeles.

And to your point, they all say they're going to fix this homeless crisis.

And, Sheriff, it is getting worse and worse.

I have lived in L.A. almost my entire life.

I have never witnessed anything this bad.

And I don't.

Has this become a point where it is now a law enforcement issue?

Sadly, it is out of the hands of activists and advocates and city leaders.

Is it now a law enforcement issue?

It is a law enforcement issue to regulate public space.

Our homeless outreach service team is doing the hard work of very compassionately doing the assessments, doing the outreach, doing the placement, cleaning up and reclaiming that public space.

We've been doing it all over the county for the last eight years.

We did it successfully in Venice Boardwalk.

We finally got Councilman Bonin to basically get off his butt and start taking care of business.

It happened in Echo Park.

We did.

Parnell Park in Whittier, Laurel Park up in the in the river shed in the riverbed.

So we do these things very successfully, complying with all of the laws and getting people aligned with the help that they need.

But we cannot have city councilman obstructing the process.

Our supervisors sitting on their hands waiting for some outcome.

This never going to happen because all the money is flowing to the homeless industrial complex, the service providers, the VA one C threes.

They're making banks while the community suffers.

And we just got to put an end to this and call a spade a spade the way we see it.

Final question on the homeless issue and then we'll talk about a lot of other things.

Sheriff, how do you walk the fine line between being a tough law enforcement officer related to homelessness, but also realizing that there needs to be compassion as well?

And a lot of these people are sick.

Sadly.

There is a very easy way to walk a fine line.

I mean, it's a scary line sometimes, but when I'm out there with the hope the host came in, Lieutenant Jeff Dietrich, who's running it, I mean, the horror stories we've come across and that people were able to help and get them out of their misery.

We're losing five people a day die on the streets for lack of care.

So the people that think somehow we're being compassionate by not doing anything?

No, we're actually condemning people to die on the street.

I have L.A. County USC Medical Center.

That behemoth built back in the thirties sits empty.

I have Saint Vincent Medical Center sits empty.

Both of those can be repurposed for mental health treatment.

Residential mental health treatment with beds, with a stepdown capacity between high observation, medium observation and outpatient basis.

Community based.

These things are available.

This is the obligation of the Board of Supervisors now to increase mental health capacity treatment and bed space.

And they've not.

They have failed miserably year after year going through the same formulas as we keep hearing news.

Oh, another hospital is closing.

Oh, another hospital is closing.

So that leaves the deputies on the street running around trying to find bed space for someone for a 72 hour hold.

It becomes a 72 minute hold.

As soon as they walk out the psychiatric, the clinicians release a person to free up the bed space and we're back to square one again.

That insanity has to stop.

We have to take this as a marshall Plan storm the shores of Normandy type intensity.

But we can do this.

We have the legal authority, we have the resources.

The only thing is missing out of this equation is political will.

That is it.

Sheriff, there is another insanity of sorts here in Los Angeles.

Crime rates are soaring in L.A.

I know here in the news media, we use the term all too often, the soaring crime wave.

Sadly, it's sometimes a politicized word.

You know, the liberals, they have their agenda, the conservatives in the media, they have their agenda.

With that said, what do you believe is the cause of the soaring crime rate?

And it could it be related to this defund the police campaign?

Talk about that, please.

Well, crime itself is a very complex issue.

It has a lot of variables that influence it.

Crime rates up and down, and it's a very complex formula.

But some of the elements that we can foresee, for example, is the pandemic.

When the pandemic hit, all of the rates run historic downward trend.

As soon as 2020 came along in the pandemic and businesses shut down, that put new pressures on society as a whole increase mental health issues, depression and all sudden food scarcity and a lot of insecurities were built in.

And a lot of the institutions that were used to alleviate these were closed as well.

So you had a double whammy of things happening and we started seeing violent crime go up in terms of assaults, aggravated assaults with firearms.

Homicides in particular are up 60%.

Last year they were up 36%.

This year now it's up 60%.

So that number is just taking off and it's a huge concern.

And another thing, defunding law enforcement, probably one of the dumbest ideas in the last 200 years of our nation's history.

Well, when you defund law enforcement, you lose investigators, you lose gang investigators, you lose patrol deputies, you lose the capacity to house people that are violent inmates.

All these things are you're losing that capacity to investigate, to prevent, to detect and do all these things.

And with that comes a consequence because now the criminal element realize, wow, there's less people holding me accountable.

The consequences are lower because now I have a very permissive D.A.

under the banner of progressivism.

But he's not going to hold any be accountable for anything.

And that encourages the criminal element to, hey, I can do more now.

I'm not accountable to anybody and there's nothing holding me back.

And you're seeing it.

Look at property theft rates.

It's gotten so bad to the point now that people are not even bothering reporting petty thefts, beer runs and things like that.

But you you'll have some people be disingenuous and say, oh, look at our theft rates are down in spite of Prop 47 one.

It's absolute nonsense.

People just gave up reporting on it because it serves no purpose with law enforcement hands tied because they're not getting prosecutions of it is becoming pointless.

But we see it.

How many CVS have closed now in California?

TJ Max, we all saw the video of the guy doing I call the gas Gun shop, grabs all the merchandise he wants and just walks out of the store.

And that is all of that contributes.

And then another element, politicians saying that you cannot trust law enforcement, that they're all racist, all cops are bastards.

You heard all that language f 12 throughout the civil unrest period.

All of it was designed deliberately to de-legitimize law enforcement to the benefit of someone's career, political career, because they thought that's going to get them more votes.

Well, at the end of the day, those cops still have to make those arrests.

They still have to face violent assaults.

Look what happened last night at Sentry, where two guys came out shooting at the deputies who were trying to stop them for having committed a robbery.

That is a type of of conflict and resistance, violent resistance that law enforcement is facing these days.

And some of it can go right back to the hands of our fearless elected politicians being shameless and just being politicians and not leaders.

So with regards to crime, Sheriff, given all these challenges and everything you and your deputies have to deal with, how then do you fight crime and try to get those numbers to decrease?

Well, again, with our department, we lost $145 million in the previous fiscal year.

The fiscal year that just ended.

We lost another 145 million.

This fiscal year, we're facing a deficit of 114 million budget cut.

We lost 1400 positions.

So now we're scrambling to make ends meet and keep enough deputies out there in the field and enough investigators handling their cases.

But their caseload is becoming staggering.

Our homicide investigators clearance rate, when they solve a case, is now dropped down to 35%.

But my board of supervisors won't admit they've done anything wrong and they just refuse to take responsibility.

They want absolute control over everything but no part when it comes to responsibility for the outcome of their policies, of their funding efforts, because the board of Supervisors sets our budget, they're also responsible for the outcome when it goes bad, but you'll never hear them accept their responsibility.

Sheriff, speaking about policy, I'm not sure I know exactly what your policy is on immigration, particularly to the effect of what's happening here in Southern California, Los Angeles, obviously, we're talking about immigration, the southern border.

It is a crisis these days.

It's having an impact on so many areas.

But from a law enforcement perspective, and I don't want to politicize this as I want about I'm very centrist, but what is your view of the Trump immigration policy versus the Biden immigration policy?

Can anything be done on the local level to sort of help with this difficult situation?

Because it is rather disastrous now as we speak, seeing what is happening at the border?

I've never witnessed anything like that.

Well, here's something that a bit of good news, but it comes from an unusual source.

I had the pleasure and the privilege of being visited by the vice president of Guatemala who was in town.

He's also, I believe, running for president of Guatemala.

And he said that Guatemalans, foreign nationals in the United States send back to Guatemala every year, $82 billion, a big number.

And the national the budget of the nation of Guatemala is about $82 billion.

So the more people are able to work here and send the money home reduces the pressure on people at home from trying to migrate over here.

It's a very delicate balance between those two things.

If you have a successful workforce here sending the money home, that is the best thing we can do as a nation to stabilize Guatemala so that we don't have a flood of immigrants walking all the way from Guatemala to our southern border.

And that's what you're seeing.

So while people were all assailing the day laborers and all the workers here, they were actually doing something that prevents more people from coming over.

So you can see how this is really not a political issue.

It's actually a humanitarian economic issue.

When you balance the equation, right.

You have the perfect world where you don't have the pressure to immigrate and you have a healthy business climate in the United States and a healthy economy in Guatemala.

That is a recipe for the entire Western Hemisphere to figure out and get it right now how to do that And this political hyperpartisan environment is anyone's guess.

But what I had with that conversation with him was very, very special because it really opened my eyes to, okay, there's a different take on this.

So while people are busy condemning the undocumented workers here, they're actually doing something because, one, they're doing jobs that people here don't want to take.

In fact, we have a hard time filling the jobs here because people do want to do a minimum wage work and they're doing a service in their own country as well, sending that money back.

So we got to start thinking bigger and check the political egos at the door and figure out in just raw numbers what is the best solution that keeps that balance between both sides.

Next issue we must speak about and again, thank you for this one on one interview.

Transparency, or as the critics would say, a lack thereof.

Now in defense of the sheriff's department.

And I've lived here basically my entire life, every sheriff's administration and well before you, as you know, had issues, or at least critics said or constantly cited a lack of transparency issues at your department.

But now you're the guy, you're the person and you're dealing with this criticism.

It is fair to say that often the public does not know exactly what's going on at your department, at the sheriff's department.

We've heard everything.

We've seen the reports in the L.A. Times that quote unquote, the sheriff's deputies, gangs, the jailhouse gangs where the deputies excessive force, this cop on citizen crime.

Now, your critics are saying that you sort of really favor your deputies and not the citizens.

Can you talk about this bigger issue of transparency and what we need to know, Sheriff?

Well, a very good question.

I appreciate that.

I'll tell you I'll tell you that is transparency is fundamental to my time in office, in my administration.

One of the very first things I did when I took over, in fact, the very first week, I pushed hard for the body, worn cameras, and I pushed and fought tooth and nail and surprisingly had a fight against the Board of Supervisors.

And why am I why is it so difficult?

Why is there so much red tape to get something that everybody wants?

It turns out that the Board of supervisors did not want a political win that would be perceived by having the body worn cameras bright and early.

We could have had them in the summer of 2019.

Instead, it took all the way to October of 20 or 2020 before we started rolling it out.

And now we're almost done.

We have 19 of 23 patrol stations equipped with the body worn cameras.

That is the ultimate in transparency.

We took a website list board.

We put a transparency tab on there in all of the contents of what the department generates.

We put it on the website so any any citizen can or resident can go through it and see all about deputies involved shootings, see body worn camera footage, see the district attorney's report, the coroner's report.

You can see our discipline history and who gets not the name of the person, but which people get suspended without pay or written reprimands are terminated.

What causes them to be terminated?

So anybody who tries to say we don't hold people accountable, I'd say they're absolutely false, falsely asserting that.

And all they have to do is go to the website and you can read for yourself exactly how we hold people accountable and for what reasons.

And because you're seeing it and reading it, there's transparency.

All my communications between myself, the inspector general and the Civilian Oversight Commission, we put it all online and I would challenge any county department, including everything from the Board of Supervisors, to try to be as transparent as a sheriff's department.

We're more than happy to serve as a model.

In fact, we'll show them how to get the job done, but they're the ones always decrying transparency, accountability and oversight by the end of the day.

We're the only ones that are truly transparent, accountable.

I hear you.

And thank you for that.

I greatly appreciate that.

And yet, with all that said, what can you tell your critics who say there's still needs to be more transparency?

I guess I'm asking, Sheriff, however, what can your department do better?

Well, there's three things we cannot put out publicly.

We cannot release information.

This active investigations, administrative, criminally, for obviously legal reasons.

You don't release what's still being made.

We don't release confidential personnel information just like can go to your employer.

Hey, I want to see your complete personnel file.

Your employees say, no, screw you.

You're not going to get it because there's reasons.

There's laws that govern that.

Same thing with ours.

The third one is we don't release victim information, witness information on sex crimes and things like that.

That's dictated by the legislature there.

They're considered confidential records and for obvious reasons.

So those three categories are always going to be off limits.

Everything else is available and we're trying to put it all out there.

It's not cheap.

It's expensive to be transparent.

In fact, this SB 1421, the California Sunshine Law that won, we fought tooth and nail to get all the information online and available in all the requests for 1421 records.

We did not have the resources, neither the legal resources know the redaction software.

We asked the county six times, six times over the course of a year and a half to help us so we can meet the obligation.

And six time they told us to pound sand while they were assailing us for lack of transparency.

At the very same time.

So that's politics at its finest.

Scientists at the county level, that's how the game is played.

Unfortunately, the unsuspecting resident or voter is aware of these things because they see the duck on the surface of the pond.

They don't see those people, you know, furiously paddling away.

And that's that's what the board does.

Sheriff, we have about a minute and a half left in this interview.

Final question, Who the heck are you?

Who is Sheriff Alex Villanueva?

Where do you get all this conviction, this sort of take no prisoners, tell it like it is style.

Yeah.

You know, I want to find out more about you and about the remaining minute and a half we have.

Well, I'll tell you this.

I was raised the right way.

My mom and dad were firm believers, a strong religious belief and a firm believer in education as an equal opportunity employer.

I got the education, and when I got the job, I said, let's do things the right way for the right reasons.

So every single decision that I've made, be it rehiring someone who was wrongfully terminated, be it toeing the line and making sure we defended First Amendment rights while protecting the county against vandalism and rioting, for example, meaning safeguarding the inmates.

So they didn't all die from COVID 19.

We did all these things for the right reason.

Same thing was taking ice out of the county jails because this is about safeguarding the million undocumented residents.

They're part of L.A. County's community.

So I get death threats from the right.

I get them from the left.

But at the end of the day, I'm right where I need to be right in the middle, doing things based on principles.

I hear you.

Thank you for that.

L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, thank you so much for a great interview.

Greatly appreciated.

Thank you for the opportunity.

And for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions and comments or story ideas so we can hear from you.

I'll be sure to get back to you and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on a PBS mobile app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS, I'm David Nazar.